 I'm burnt out with my work and YouTube afterwards. I'm in a creator's rut in an identity crisis. Where the heck am I gonna find time to do YouTube? Welcome back to the channel, everybody. For those of you who are new around here, my name is Michael, aka Dr. Gelini, and I'm a board certified diagnostic and interventional radiologist. So as the title says, you may know what this video is about. And today we're going to be talking about why I've been MIA the last few weeks or even the last few months. And this is kind of a multi-factorial response. So we're gonna break it down. Just kind of bear with me here. We'll start with number one. The first reason I've been MIA is because we are currently down a person in our practice. And when you are down someone in your practice, that means that everybody else has to pick up the slack because all of the images, the studies, the patients don't stop. You just have to get through a lot more volume with one last person, which means you have to work more. You may have to work longer hours. You may have to work more shifts or you may just have to get home later. So basically what that means is we have to just absorb all of that work that the person used to do and now it's just divided amongst all of us. And for those of you who don't know, I usually film my YouTube videos after working all day for the most part or sometimes on the weekends when I have free time. But the problem is being down a person in my practice having to work extra shifts or longer hours makes it a little hard to come home and want to work more doing YouTube. The last thing you wanna do after working long hours and really hard shifts is to work more, as you can imagine. And for those of you who don't know, planning out these videos takes quite a bit of effort. I have to research topics, write scripts, I have to film the video, I have to upload the videos, I have to talk with my editor and it kind of takes a lot of time and energy. So after those brutal work days and while I'm still working out in the morning, which means I'm very tired by time I get home at the end of the day, you can see why now that I was getting a little burnt out. It was almost like I was working until I rested my head on the pillow at night. I was literally working up until I went to sleep. And that's exhausting and obviously leads to burnout, like we've talked about so much on this channel. This is just a little different form of burnout. And some of you may know who are creators yourself. YouTube is definitely a full-time job. So it was basically like I was having two very tough full-time jobs. And that's why I got burnout, which brings me to my next point. Number two, I've talked about this a little bit in the past. And for those of you who don't know, YouTube likes to keep creators in a little box, which is a good thing and also a bad thing. It's a good thing because if you're interested in a certain topic, you just get massive amounts of information thrown at you and YouTube kind of deers you towards that algorithm for that specific topic. But it's bad for you if you are a creator and you want to kind of break out of this box that YouTube put you in. For instance, I started my channel doing more pre-medical and medical school type information and YouTube kind of promoted my channel as such. They try to put you in a box so they can exploit the YouTube algorithm and reach the biggest audience possible. And you may have noticed that I've also thrown in a few other type of videos like finance or travel related videos. And usually those videos don't perform as well. And the reason being is because YouTube doesn't like to promote those kind of videos because it doesn't match my niche or what YouTube labels my box as. If that makes sense. So if you made a video that's not on brand with your YouTube channel, YouTube doesn't promote it, which means you don't get as many views. Or in other words, YouTube doesn't recommend your video. So why am I even talking about that? Well, I made a video about six months or so where I talked about how I'm breaking out of the niche that YouTube has put me in. I wanted to stop doing all the pre-medical and medical school type content because that really isn't me anymore. And let's face it, it's been like 11 plus years since I even thought about pre-medical school or pre-med stuff or even medical school stuff. And I'm so far out of that area that I can't even really speak on it intelligently. And for that reason, you shouldn't be taking my advice about something I have no idea about. Just because I went through it 10, 11 years ago doesn't mean I know the current information that's available now. And honestly, I don't really care because that's not part of my life anymore. So in this whole process of me trying to break out of my mold for the past six months, I started posting other type of videos with different types of content from finance, travel vlogs, and messing around with things to see if they worked and see how I wanted to pivot my channel. It was awesome that I actually broke out of my mold or the box that YouTube put me in and I was able to create content that I wanted to do and break out of my box. But then by doing so many types of videos, like days in the life, deep dives into medical cases, deep analysis on current events related to physicians, finances, et cetera, I basically just kind of found myself without a true identity. And it's almost like YouTube made it that way. And then this little thing called summer rolled around. All that time that I would have spent researching my videos and writing scripts, I was now living up the good sunny life of New Jersey. I lived close to the beach, so I was at the beach after work. I go to the beach on the weekends and I'm just kind of enjoying my summer. And you may have noticed I picked up this little extracurricular activity known as golf, which turns out that I am currently obsessed with and can't stop playing. I've become obsessed with golf for the same reasons I became obsessed with being an interventional radiologist. It's a challenging sport that takes just the right touch to be good at. And just like my field, it's very humbling if things don't go the way you plan. And I think that's why I get the question, why is it so cliche for doctors to play golf? And I'm just part of that cliche. But then I figured it out. For me, it's just that. It's the thrill, it's the challenge, it's the dexterity, it's the mental toughness. All these things keep you wanting to get better and make you get back out there and play more. The only problem with golf is it takes around four plus hours to play 18 holes. So not only do I now have my wife angry at me, she actually doesn't care. She lets me play golf all the time. I also have no extra time for creating content. So I'm burnt out with my work and YouTube afterwards. I'm in a creator's rut and an identity crisis. And I also picked up golf. So where the heck am I gonna find time to do YouTube? Basically what I'm trying to say here is that doing all this stuff is the reason why I needed a break. And I basically took two months off with one or two videos here and there. But I can't take a break forever because after all I worked extremely hard for many, many years to build this channel. It would be stupid to stop now, right? To stop now would be a disgrace. And I would let my own self down. And a lot of other people that enjoy watching my videos. And frankly, without you all, this channel would be nothing. And by the way, for those of you who haven't subscribed, go ahead and click the subscribe button right now. So after a long talk with Angelana last night, we basically came up with a plan to keep going and push forward. And I am now officially motivated to keep going, to keep cranking out content and growing this channel to wherever it can grow. And instead of worrying about figuring out my identity, I'll just continue what I'm doing and figure it out along the way. There's no true guidelines to figuring out this process. You just have to do it. Some videos taint, some videos do well and you just kind of adapt. After all, that's kind of what I've been doing my whole life anyways. So why not just do it with YouTube? Not everything has to be so cut and dry or black and white, even though that's how I want things to be. But unfortunately, nothing in life is that way. You just gotta go with the flow and see where we bring this channel together. However, while we are on this topic, you do need to help me a little bit going forward. I want to know what you all want to see. You know that I don't want to post any pre-med or med school type stuff, but do you want to see more day in the life type of videos? Because I used to do a ton of those back in the day, but the problem is life as an attending isn't as exciting on camera as life was in fellowship. I'm not up two in the morning, three in the morning doing seven days straight of call, constantly doing in the hospital, doing crazy complex cases. As an attending, you usually do more simple things, bread and butter cases and don't get called in that often. And when you do get called in, it's not some crazy complex case in the middle of the night, a usual emergent case, which is why I haven't really filmed those day in the life type videos because I feel like you all would get bored. And honestly, I don't really know how to make them super creative because there's not really much going on. I just go to work, normal eight to five, do some cases, read some studies and then go home. It's like the same day over and over again. I also kind of stopped doing those type of videos because every single person that's in the medical space on YouTube has now started doing those videos. And I don't like to do things that everybody else does. I want to do things a little differently, set the trends rather than just keep following, even though I was basically an OG day in the life here. So I'm not saying I started that trend, but I definitely was one of the first people to do that and make it exciting. So what about the reaction videos that I usually do? I do like making them because they are educational for my audience, but again, every single doctor, med student, whoever on YouTube does these reaction type videos, mostly because it's easy content and it doesn't take any thought or planning and it's kind of trendy and people seem to like it. But again, it's very common and I don't want to just keep doing these trendy things. And of course I've done my fair share reaction videos and I still will in the future as long as they're pertinent to my channel, whatever that may be. But I do want to try to limit them because I don't want to do everything that everybody else is doing. So let me know what you think about that. So I'm going to continue to crank out content and keep my creative juices flowing and hopefully make original content that you all enjoy. And also that I enjoy making. Please let me know in the comments any videos or style of videos that you want to see me do. I would really appreciate it. I really value your feedback and that's what the comments of this video are going to be about. I'm genuinely curious to see what you all like the most. So thank you for staying with me and watching this video. I really appreciate it. I promise to keep going. We're going to start cranking out some good content soon and I apologize for my absent. I'm not quitting YouTube or anything like that. I'm simply just trying to figure out how to get my YouTube channel to the next level. Thanks again for supporting me over the years and if you're not subscribed to my channel, go ahead and hit that subscribe button right now. Follow me on Instagram and TikTok if you don't already. I post some cool things over there as well. Now it's time to get back to the YouTube algorithm. And in order to do that, you have to like this video. But seriously, just like this video, I need to get back in the algorithm. It took a little too long to break. And if you made it this far, by the way, I want you to comment avocado before you tell me what kind of video you want to see. Well, avocado or an avocado emoji. That way I know who my true subscribers are. So I have nothing else to do, but wait for your advice. And as always, I'll see you all on the next video. Bye.